You may wonder what my daily calorie requirement as a runner is? And how to calculate it? To correctly determine the calories burned, you need to consider not only the duration of the workout but also your weight and body fat percentage. You will burn more calories if you have a small amount of fat and a large muscle mass.
Should I Count Calories as a Runner?
Yes, you should because no two runners are the same. If you look at elite distance runners, they burn an average of 3750 calories.
Different body weight, the amount of oxygen consumed, and the volume of fast muscle fibers
all affect the consumption of calories by an athlete.
But since excess calories lead to excess weight, which can lead to serious health problems (including sleep problems and heart disease), it’s important to have a general idea of how many calories you eat and expend.
Daily Calorie Intake Calculator and How it Works
A calorie calculator will show the amount of energy burned during a workout. The average person burns 65 calories per kilometer of running, but that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. What if you jog and use less energy, or your heart doesn’t beat as fast or slow as everyone else?
Sports watches are a popular choice to measure calories burned. However, a study from Stanford University and the Swiss School of Sport and Health Science determined that fitness trackers like the Apple Watch have a margin of error of 27 percent.
A simple calorie calculator will show you how many calories your body uses while running. Add this to the calories you burn outside of training time throughout the day to calculate the number of calories that need to be compensated:
- There are 8 calories in 1 gram of fat
- There are 4 calories in 1 gram of protein or carbohydrate
Unused calories accumulate in the body’s fat cells, which begin to give energy when there is a need for it. If you consume more calories than you burn, you start gaining weight. If, on the contrary, you burn more (with the help of training) than you consume – your weight will most likely go down.
How Many Calories Should I Eat a Day?
Every day you need a different amount of calories. The easiest way to know how many calories you need is to calculate the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This is the minimum amount of calories your body requires to function, which can start at 1800 calories per day for an adult woman and 2400 calories per day for an adult male.
“Women should consume 20-25 grams of protein with each meal as part of a three-meals-a-day diet. For men, 25-30 grams of protein per meal should be enough,” says Dr. Zhaoping Li, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
An online calorie calculator tool will allow you to calculate the amount of energy your body needs daily depending on your height, weight, age, and degree of physical activity (calorie rate).
To calculate your calories burned while running, enter your weight, running intensity, and the amount of time spent running in minutes into the calculator.
The result of the calculation already includes an adjustment for the main calorie intake of the body (after all, calories are consumed even in sleep).
Another way to calculate is to use a formula. The American Dietetic Association recognizes the Mifflin-St. Jeor formula as the most accurate among similar ones.
The Mifflin-St. Jeor formula looks like this:
For women: (10 × weight in kilograms) + (6.25 × height in centimeters) − (5 × age in years) − 161
For men: (10 × weight in kilograms) + (6.25 × height in centimeters) − (5 × age in years) + 5
Therefore, for a 30-year-old woman with a height of 170 cm and a weight of 65 kg, the calories necessary for the body to function at rest will be as follows:
(10 x 65) + (6.25 x 170) – (5 x 30) – 161 = 1401.5
The formula also takes into account physical activity, based on which a coefficient is added to the resulting figure.
- If you do not have physical activity and sedentary work, multiply the result by 1.2.
- If you do short runs or light exercises 1-3 times a week, multiply by 1.375.
- If you do moderate exercise 3-5 times a week, multiply your calories by 1.55.
- If you train fully 6-7 times a week, then you need to multiply the result by 1.725.
- And finally, if your job is physical labor, you train 2 times a day and include strength exercises in your training program, your coefficient will be 1.9.
MedicalNewsToday states that by running faster, you burn more calories.
- running 12-minute miles: 282 kcal
- running 10-minute miles: 352 kcal
- running 7.5-minute miles: 428 kcal
If you run calmly, fewer calories will be spent for the same time, but they will be spent mainly from fat. If you run fast, more calories will be burned, but their source will be glycogen stores in the muscles and liver, and after such a workout, calories will “burn out” for some time.
Calories Burned after Running
When running fast, the number of calories burned during a workout will be more than when jogging. With a high-intensity load, the effect of “oxygen debt” occurs, and after it, this debt is compensated through a process known as EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption).
Thus, after exercise, the body tries to recover and return to a state of balance, but it spends more oxygen than usual and thus consumes more energy at rest. During EPOC, up to 500 additional calories can be expended; this increased oxygen consumption can last up to 48 hours.
If you add the number of calories burned in a high-intensity workout and those calories burned after it, you get impressive results if you are running for weight loss. But it is essential to understand that it is simply impossible to constantly train in a high load zone since the body will not have time to recover, which will lead to overtraining and injuries.
How Many Calories Do 10,000 Steps Burn?
For most people, walking 10,000 steps equates to 5 miles. For example, if you quickly climb a mountain at a speed of 5 mph, then calories burned walking will be more than 7 per minute. On the other hand, if you slowly go down the mountain at a speed of 3 mph, you will burn from 3.5 to 7 calories per minute.
Running and walking are not just ways to energize and improve the body and live a long healthy life. They are also effective methods of burning calories.
Calorie consumption while running is affected by weight, endurance, and metabolism. How many calories are burned while running depends on the type of run and the distance, speed, and time. A calorie calculator will make it easy to know how many calories to eat and burn for a better workout.
